"This is going to be awkward." He pursed his lips. "I'm not the guy who should be giving this speech. He isn't here. We're putting up a stone today engraved with his name, but he won't be under it. Overwatch won't release the body."

They were all there. Mostly in body, a few in spirit where the body wasn't yet able. The Ward Cemetery was filled with them, his motley crew in their formal wear. He addressed them from behind the concrete wall supporting the older tomb stones, speaking from memory with no notes in hand. He was wearing his funeral suit.

"This isn't a eulogy for Allan McInnis. There's going to be one; there'll be one for everyone who died on October the 12th, all of our people, separately. We're not gathered here to fill a mass grave. We're here to remember our friends and family, individually, and to honour them as they deserve."

The Aphian sand-mages had already interred the dead, hundreds strong, in new plots which more than doubled the necropolis' population. Udo Okorie had directed them. She'd also carved the new markers from bedrock stone. She and her wives had been given pride of place in their section, and Sevara stood proudly behind her.

"They deserved better. All of them. Allan should not have had to push that button. But he did have to, and I won't hear otherwise." He sighed. It wasn't a practiced part of the speech, it just happened at this point every time. "It takes a lot of courage to sacrifice yourself, even to save the world. It takes a lot more to take so many people you love with you. He was no pharaoh, and we were not his servants. This was a price we all signed up to potentially pay when we took up our posts beneath Camp Ipperwash. Those explosives were planted for a reason. They were meant to prevent a world we're all now going to have to find a way to live in. It's going to be that much harder without Allan."

The All-Sections Chief stood with their people, hundreds of them. Nx-43 had sent less a delegation than a quorum.

"And without Karen." He willed his throat not to tighten. It did what it wanted instead. "A lot of you didn't know her. Actually, pretty much all of you didn't. Not really. You knew the person she created for you to hate. She did that for you. Painted her face with a target for your frustrations. She took that same bullet for all of us every single day for over twenty years. I will never be that brave. If she was still here…" His face was trembling, as though a mask he wore which was false and failing. He squinted, and powered through. "If she was still here, she'd be standing in my place, and I'd be in the crowd where I belong. It isn't fair."

Karen's people had come out of DISCIDIUM better than most. Their workspaces were trashed, but very few of them had been swallowed up by the pioneer cemetery earth. Was it his imagination, or did Dolly Ferber already seem more detached and severe? He hoped it was his imagination.

"It isn't fair at all. Fate played a cruel joke on Trevor Bremmel and his daughter. We can't let the way his life ended overshadow the good he did in his long and, let's admit it, frequently obnoxious career." The crowd reacted with uneasy mirth. Joanna tried to smile through her tears. Rasmus Mataxas had one arm around her shoulder, the other on a crutch. Billie Forsythe had both around her neck. "He was not an easy man to get along with, but he was still a good man. We will miss him."

Behind her daughter, Helena Forsythe watched the clouds soar overhead. She was sitting in a wheelchair. She didn't trust her feet anymore.

"We'll miss Max Vroom, who came here after our last major breach and leaves us during the most recent one. He had friends here. He had family back in the Netherlands. He gave up a lot of opportunities to support us in what we do, and the way he was repaid is utterly criminal."

Hachiro Kuroki, who had also joined during the Password fiasco, needed two crutches. Something neurological. It was almost comical to see the thin and bookish Xinyi Du propping him up. Howard Yancy was now wearing the Chief's pips. There was a large pink unicorn in a tutu standing beside him to the right. There was something absurd to the left, something Overwatch would have objected to very stridently if they'd known about this assembly outside of the interdiction zone.

But they didn't know.

He hadn't told them.

"Those people were all my friends. I knew them personally, knew them very well. I could tell you how they'd react, what they might say, on any given occasion. But occasionally they'd surprise me, and I've lost that now. They're just the impressions on my mind, duller and flatter than the real thing. That's going to haunt me."

There were ghosts running amok in the facility below. But up here, they were paying their respects. They stood at the treeline, listening. After saving Rasmus' life, they had refused all attempts at interaction. But they hadn't completely vanished yet. As though they were waiting for something.

The glimmering god with the worn-out cap was among them. He radiated a gentle sorrow. He stared fixedly at Flora Nascimbeni, who hadn't yet seen him. She was standing with her father. Her father, as always, looked both proud and pained.

"But what about the people I didn't know so well? I'm an archivist. I'm no social butterfly. I know my people…" They were standing in a little group — littler than before, he still couldn't believe Ignaz Achterberg was gone — with Geneviève Voclain at their head and Jennifer Vide in the middle. Her mother was holding her hand. He gestured at his entire audience, encompassing the swathe of autumn colour. "But now you're all my people, aren't you? I can't just stand here and say nice things about the Chairs and Chiefs and my predecessor in the big chair, and then let you all speak for me on behalf of the 'little people'. Because none of them were little to everyone. Nobody is."

He could see the look Delfina Ibanez was giving him. He tried to ignore it. He was already fighting back tears, and losing. If he started to laugh, it would be over. Rozálie Astrauskas ruffled her hair fondly, and he thought he saw her snarl.

"So, I asked my staff to help me out a little. Something to make this more meaningful. Something we can all take away from this first, insufficient speech, so that I can pay my respects to all the friends I'll now never get the chance to meet. I'm going to meet them now, right now, in front of you all. Some of you will be meeting them with me. Let's learn who they were together."

Lillian Lillihammer handed him a deck of cards. It was thinner than it needed to be. Not her first act of memetics since returning, not nearly, but one of the most vital. She was tense as an aspen tree. Not the trembling kind.

He glanced down, just for an instant, then looked back up. ""Ayesha Ali, junior technician, Identity and Technocryptography. She loved hockey. I'm sure you were a wonderful person anyway, Ayesha." The assembled body murmured with a wandering chuckle. "Thank you for everything. Hans Amsel, researcher, Theology and Teleology. Kept his house in Grand Cove exclusively so he could host weekly barbecues in the summer. Never burnt a burger. Thank you for everything, Hans."

An appalling procession of names later, his throat dry and most eyes around him far from it, he finally finished. "I only ran through that list once before today, and I couldn't get it down under an hour and a half. And yet not a one of you made to leave as I told you these tales, brief but I believe consequential. You stayed to listen. You heard them all. Thank you for your patience, and your faith, and the respects you've paid here today. Thank you for honouring our dead, as they honoured us with their lives."

Somewhere in the deepest dark, a lonely man was surely weeping. He wouldn't be weeping long. It was unacceptable.

Somewhere beyond, where he couldn't see, he could feel another lonely man observing the wake. The collective funeral. The celebration of life. The earth trembled, very slightly, and he imagined Wynn Rydderech was weeping.

"We're damaged now. There are chips in every façade. We have lost so much that it won't all register for ages. We'll feel it more keenly every day for a long, long time. And there's an appalling amount of work before us to set even a fraction of it right again. There are wounds that will never heal, damage that cannot be undone."

Nhung Ngo now walked with a cane. Randy Gershwin looked permanently shell-shocked. Michael Nass had permanent burns. Daniil Sokolsky had obvious trouble focusing. Philip Deering was catatonic, and Amelia Torosyan kept looking at him like she expected his body to disappear with his mind. Azad Banerjee, by contrast, couldn't seem to look at him at all. Imrich Sýkora was a twitching mess. Ji O looked like she'd just come back from a bad vacation to the River Styx. Thilo Zwist was a dictionary illustration of guilt.

Ilse Reynders and Jay Everwood linked hands via Researcher James, Age 6, who had a gleam of new understanding in his wide eyes. Eszter Kárpáthy and Basil Qadir were standing side-by-side, for the first time in nearly two years. Polyxeni Mataxas and Mali Wattana and the Lady in Red stood together, ghost and busters in perfect accord. Bastien and Gabrielle LeBlanc were arm-in-arm. Eileen Veiksaar kept checking her tablet; not out of disrespect, but to whisper something to the green-haired avatar depicted on its screen. Nastya Koslova and Feliks Koslov stood at a subtle angle from one another, almost but not quite back-to-back. For defence. Out of affection.

In solidarity.

"The Council expects us to disband. We're the unfavourite now, displacing the Draintrap and Sloth's Pit from the bottom rungs. We lack the supplies, the personnel, and the strength to carry on operations as we have done."

Placeholder McDoctorate stood with Maggie Donne and John Hext, three of the most unusual recruits to this most likely doomed but most certainly righteous cause. The capture of some of the folks in this audience would have made any MTF officer's career; they were here, like everyone else, to pay homage. And to help. Some of them were here to stay. He wanted to laugh every time he saw Fantasma Moralis in particular. Oh, but they were brazen now.

They'd have to be.

"It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. We're going to survive this. We're going to turn it around. We're going to stick together, and we're going to justify the pride our beloved dead still feel in us. Nothing is lost forever. The Good Work goes on." He felt a second wind buoying him up. His voice strained with the power of their belief, all of them, his misfit crowd of miracle workers. "We've been the odd ones out all along. We're only going to get odder. If you pit my friends against the status quo, well…" He did allow himself a smirk, this time.

"I know I like those odds."